Joep Beving is a Dutch composer and pianist. Music has been a passion of Beving’s since childhood. The son of a schoolteacher, he formed his first band at the age of 14. He later won a place at a conservatoire, but repetitive strain injury to his wrist forced him to abandon his piano studies after a year. Instead, he studied public policy and administration. He then went to work in the advertising business, where he was mainly responsible for the music of numerous commercials. He also composed soundtracks for the short films Hortum (2010) and Het cadeau (2015).
Where once his goal was to hit as many notes per minute as physically possible, his style of playing has changed over the years, searching for a particular aesthetic essence. His path was illuminated by a piano that Beving inherited from his grandmother when she passed away in 2009. This German instrument insisted on a more gentle touch and a gracious pace, which eventually led Beving to adapt to a more classical vocabulary to tell his story.
In 2015 Beving released his first album – Solipsism, with modern classical atmospheric piano pieces. He himself describes his compositions as “accessible music for complex emotions”. In 2017 his second album, Prehension, appeared in a similar style to his debut album. He has attributed much of his music’s broad appeal to the stream of consciousness in which some of the pieces were conceived. Claiming that the music is already out there and that one has to ‘just’ create the circumstances for it to land.
In 2018 he took this idea one step further with the release of ‘Conatus’ of which he said: “If you see music as a living organism then it is not unthinkable that it has it’s own innate inclination to continue to exist and enhance itself.” He wrote several excerpts in Oxford. On Conatus, Beving sees compositions from his first two albums, travel through the minds of artists he admires (a.o. Suzanne Ciani, Collin Benders, Andrea Belfi) and result in new pieces of music adding new layers and dimensions which would serve as the upbeat to his next major solo project as would become apparant in April 2019.
April 2019 saw the release of HENOSIS, Joep Beving’s closing chapter in a trilogy of albums – marking the end of an intensely personal four-year spiritual and philosophical exploration. On HENOSIS the Dutch composer continues his minimalist and at times romantic style of writing, but this time explores new territories. It sets off where his sophomore album Prehension left us, the warm intimate sound of the Schimmel piano. With the help of producer Gijs van Klooster and through collaborations with Cappella Amsterdam, Echo Collective and Maarten Vos, Joep Beving opens up new musical worlds using orchestral and electronic sounds alongside the familiar piano.
